Trends On Tuesday

Connect with other feds working with emerging technologies via the Emerging Citizen Technology Office; learn from and contribute to its Emerging Citizen Technology Atlas and join their related Communities of Practice.
It is no secret that some agencies within the federal government can be behind the times when it comes to cutting-edge technology implementation. But this appears to be changing as federal agencies begin implementing futuristic technologies such as Machine Learning, Blockchain, and Virtual and Augmented Reality.

Although the term Machine Learning (ML) was coined in 1959, it’s advancement and development has never been more critical than it is today, particularly within government agencies. As the amount of data being produced, manipulated, and stored exponentially increases, so does the very real threat of cyber-security breaches and fraud. Meanwhile, federal budgets and staff resources continue to decrease. ML can provide high-value services for federal agencies including data management and analytics, security threat detection, and process improvement—but the list does not stop there.

The Pew Internet and the American Life Project released a report recently that analyzed the use of digital tools for different groups of tech literacies and found some interesting ‘digital divides’ and levels of trust, usage, and skill. The report broke out 5 personas of the American people:
Digitally Ready (17 percent of U.S. Adults) are the ardent digital learners confident in online information Cautious Clickers (31 percent of U.

Professional photographer and early “iPhonography” pioneer, Chase Jarvis coined the phrase, “The best camera is the one that’s with you.” The recent jumps in mobile phone photo technology presents interesting opportunities for government agencies to consider as mobile phone cameras are starting to rival and surpass professional gear. When Google and Apple both announced their annual flagship phone upgrades this past month, the Pixel XL and iPhone 7 Plus, respectively, the most talked about and touted features were the cameras.

The seemingly sci-fi world envisioned in the movie Her is very close to becoming our reality. Several new developments merging hardware, artificial intelligence technology, chatbots and persistent audio assistants are now available, with software developer kits to expand the platforms. Amazon was first to market with their Echo device, and since have added the Echo Dot, both using their voice assistant “Alexa” to allow users to play music, buy goods from Amazon, call for a cab, check the weather and other tasks—all just using their voice commands.

The wildly popular, augmented reality game we reported on for Trends on Tuesday a few weeks ago and the focus of a piece about government agencies using it to engage citizens appears to have hit a ceiling and is slowly losing active fans in August according to a recent report in Bloomberg.
While the mobile game may be losing audience, from a brand perspective Nintendo’s Pokemon franchise was reinvigorated for a new generation of fans which will pay dividends in the future.

A new report from the Mobile Ecosystem Forum shows that most users delete apps because of security concerns.
The report also said that 47% of survey respondents would pay extra for an app that didn’t share personal information and that the inability to find a privacy policy is one of the leading reasons for consumers losing trust in an app. Privacy requirements aren’t just a “nice to have” for government agencies; including a privacy policy in all of your digital sites and apps is a new requirement from OMB Circular A-130 that was recently released.

The Pew Research Center released a report in July that shows people of Latino descent are heavily reliant on mobile phones for their Internet access, more than other ethnicities. The report said that since 2012, the percentage of Hispanic adults who used mobile devices to access the Internet jumped from 76% to 94% in 2015. These percentages are higher than both white and African American usage in the same years.

Augmented Reality games have existed for years, but have mostly failed to catch a mainstream audience; Pokémon Go just changed all that this weekend.
The game that launched early this month has exploded in popularity and is close to surpassing Twitter in daily active users, according to Forbes’ Jason Evangelho.
“The data gets even more staggering. As of 48 hours ago, Pokémon GO was installed on 5.6% of all Android devices in the United States, and is installed on more Android phones than Tinder (insert “Pokémon is now more popular than sex” joke here),” he cited.

International telecommunications network operator, Ericsson, released their Mobility Report around the future of mobile recently with a bunch of interesting data around the future of telecommunications and mobile.
The surprise star of the report is not mobile phones though—although it will continue to grow, especially in emerging markets where it hasn’t reached saturation like it has in the U.S.—it’s the Internet Of Things (IoT), which is projected to surpass mobile phones by 2018 according to Ericsson.

Internet strategist Mary Meeker delivered her 2016 Internet Trends report this month, and there are several key takeaways for government agencies to consider and continue tracking as our connected world continues to evolve:
Mobile phone adoption and Internet growth is meeting saturation. Incremental global growth will continue (especially in India, which she called out for their wild expansion) but especially for Americans, most people that want to be on the Internet can be on the Internet.

Last week, Recode published an articlefocused on a recent report from industry consultant Chetan Sharma that found the largest number of new mobile activations in the first quarter of 2016 came from a ‘different’ kind of mobile tool—cars.
There are still a lot of phone and tablet mobile activations happening—31% and 23% of all activations, respectively—but for the first time, cars edged out the smaller mobile devices with 32% of new cellular activations.

Flurry Analytics, a mobile application analytics company owned by Yahoo!, released a new report about app retention. Unless your app usage is around “gambling”—with cards (game apps), with your money (finance apps), with whether or not to bring an umbrella (weather apps), or with your health (fitness apps)—user retention and re-engagement is often a steep wall to climb. The research shows that top trends across Android and Apple apps are similar, but Android users appear to be a little more choosey when it comes to re-using an app: after 30 days, Android app retention clusters around 10%, compared to 14% for Apple.

ComScore released a report with a lot of great data about how mobile digital media usage continues to explode in 2016. It has 70 pages of charts and information to digest. Here are seven key mobile trends and takeaways:
Smartphones are exponentially driving digital media usage.** ** Digital media has tripled since 2013 and digital media use is being driven heavily by smartphones—up by 78% since 2013.

Last year Google began changing their search ranking algorithm to direct mobile users to mobile-friendly sites, and they recently announced that beginning in May they will be implementing an update to focus even more exclusively on boosting mobile-friendly sites.
In the announcement, Google encourages website owners to test their sites using the Mobile-Friendly Test and Webmaster Mobile Guide, to learn how to improve your site for mobile friendliness.
Previously we’ve covered how to prepare for “Mobilegeddon” (an industry term for the Google mobile-friendly shift) for government agencies.

A new report about email usage reinforced the importance of always building responsive websites. Yesmail’s quarterly report showed that mobile and desktop email click-to-open rates are converging to almost the same level for the first time ever. As people become more mobile-first and mobile-only users of the Internet, users opening emails on their desktop devices has dropped continuously for the past 2 years, from 22.6% to 15.3%.
The report from Yesmail states: “The results certainly support the argument for responsive design,” as those who used responsive design in all of their emails had:

Comscore released new data this month about trends in the smartphone space. The data showed that the Android platform grew in market percentage (when combining all Android manufacturers). Android overall grew 1% from September to December at the cost of Apple and Blackberry, which dropped 0.7% and 0.3%, respectively, in smartphone market share.
Comscore’s data on the most popular mobile applications showed Facebook and Google properties continue to dominate usage, with the top seven spots owned by the two corporation’s app properties.

John Connor can’t save you. Robots are here to take over the world. Two interesting new consumer mobile and digital content experiences were launched in the past week, signaling some of the first mainstream brands embracing this new paradigm of interactive, bot-driven content experiences: Quartz’s News App and The New York Times Election Slack Bot.
Both leverage different scripted technology but signal that large consumer-facing brands are using messaging technology as an experience and interface for interacting and sending and receiving information smartly.

Google Product Director and author, Luke Wroblewski, wrote a piece about how perfecting your Day 1 experience for users is critical because retention after that point is incredibly difficult. Wroblewski said that 25% of native mobile apps are abandoned after their first use and that the number of active users drops 77% in the first three days after installation.
To combat that drop off, he suggested focusing on your onboarding and the user’s first experience with the app through things like gradual sign-ups, since many people will turn off completely when they hit that wall.

__Phablets, once mocked for their large size, may be the next big form factor dominating mobile devices, if new data from the holiday season is any indication. Flurry Mobile, part of Yahoo’s mobile analytics division, published two reports about phablet devices at the beginning of the new year, showing their continued growth and that people use them more than traditional or smaller mobile devices.
The percentage of new phablet-sized phone activations during the 2014-2015 holiday period more than doubled to 27% from 13%.

As we move into 2016, here are 10 trends I foresee flourishing around mobile, technology and government:
The mobile-majority tipping point in government. Many agencies are already past this point, but as a whole, government websites are still desktop-majority, with 66% of people accessing federal websites via desktop and 34% on mobile. In 2016, the double-digit mobile growth will continue to accelerate and surpass 50% for almost all agencies. (Much of the Web passed this point last year or in 2014, btw).

The Pew Research Center released an interesting report about home Internet usage that revealed broadband usage plateaued in 2013 and, in fact, dropped 3% in 2015. Later in the report, Pew states the growth in mobile-only audiences compensated for the drop in home broadband usage, so the overall number of people with Internet access hasn’t changed significantly.
While 100% home broadband penetration may never be attainable for a number of reasons, Pew’s research found cost is the major reason for most people, cited by 43% of non-broadband users.

Agencies have used an open data competition approach in their quest to provide anytime, anywhere government. For example, in 2011, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) conducted the Apps for the Environment challenge and has a hub for apps created using EPA data. Here’s an update on challenges hosted by other agencies:
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), hosted a nationwide Reference Data Challenge to create mobile apps through Devpost.

U.S. shoppers are increasingly using their mobile devices to make purchases during the busiest shopping days: Black Friday and Thanksgiving weekend. According to Custora, online Black Friday sales rose more than 16% compared to last year, and smartphone use rose to more than 36% (up from 30% last year), with iPhones accounting for the lion’s share of purchases: 77.6%, compared to 22.1% for Android.
The Apple iOS purchase dominance was cited by other reports too.

Half a decade since Steve Jobs declared war on Adobe Flash and refused to support it on Apple’s mobile and tablet devices, Flash is finally losing its crown as one of the stand-alone products of Adobe.
In the announcement, Adobe said, “Flash has played a leading role in bringing new capabilities to the Web. From audio and animation, to interactivity and video, Flash has helped push the Web forward.

How do you capture millennial and Hispanic eyes? Through their hands. (More specifically: their mobile devices, and the social apps within!). AdAge recently analyzed a study from Nielsen’s Homescan panel which found that in a typical month, 12.2% of millennials can only be reached through TV (looking at the top 10 networks only) versus 14.2% who can only be reached on Facebook.
The numbers are similar for U.S. Hispanics: 16.

Mobile users of government websites are growing in double digit percentages and will likely soon become the majority.
For some recent internal project research, I dove into some of the federal government-wide analytics looking at mobile usage and found a few interesting tidbits to share:
It’s an OS battle of the As. Apple devices slightly edge out Android as the most popular with 49.24% to 44.88% of the audience. There’s no realistic third contender.

Pew released a recent report tracking trends in digital device ownership and found smartphones and tablets have continued to grow in recent years, while other devices have stalled.
The big headlines from the report are: Cell phones are now in the hands of more than 92% of U.S. adults, although this trend started to flatten over the past 3 years. That elusive final 8% of U.S. adults might take a while to adopt (or die off, as adults over 65 were the smallest percentage of smartphone users at just 30% of that population, while 78% of them have a cell phone of some sort).

Josh Clark, one of the pioneers of touch Web design, and author of Tapworthy and Designing for Touch, published an excellent article on A List Apart analyzing How We Hold Our Gadgetsthat has a wealth of data and graphics about this interesting and emerging design challenge. Below are 5 notable lessons from the post:
1. Portrait (vertical) orientation dominates over landscape (horizontal) usage with a 60-40 split. This is often driven by the app or content experience and will probably continue to grow more divided as many applications now aren’t even offering landscape orientations anymore—including Facebook, Flipboard, Instagram, Pandora, even Netflix (on Android, however, along with video playback, Netflix’s library browsing mode can still be viewed horizontally).

An industry group tracking the growth and production of the “Internet of Things,” a term given to Internet-connected devices and accessories, is predicting that growth will slow over the next 6 months, but then surge 3 times as fast, over the following year.
The research was organized by the IoT M2M Council, which is made up of 140 executives in the Internet of Things space. MediaPost described it as “the calm before the IoT storm.

ComScore released a new 2015 U.S. Mobile App report tracking native mobile app usage among adults over 18 years old, and it reinforced a lot of the trends we’ve been reporting on DigitalGov.
Quartz succinctly summarized the reportwith the headline: “You really only use three apps on your phone.” The report clearly pointed out that Americans spend 50% of their time in their most-used app, and 78% in their top three favorite apps.

The New York Times recently published a report evaluating the cost of mobile ads on news websites and found that on many of the major sites, the ads were taking as much bandwidth and time as the content (if not more, in some cases).
This comes after the recent hubub over Apple starting to allow ad blockers on their mobile operating system to cut down on aggressive, high-bandwidth consuming ads, analytics, and tracking software that slows down the mobile experience for users.

NASA recently announced the winners of a smartwatch app interface competition. A Canadian duo won the design competition, and NASA’s plan is to build the app with 2016 funding to have it available for astronauts to use when they are aboard the International Space Station.
This is the first government smartwatch app development we’ve talked about on DigitalGov and an example of a great mobile moment use case. Not only is the smart app interesting (see the UI images!

Move over, 60 inch widescreens—for the first time ever, U.S. consumers are spending more time in mobile apps than on TV.
An article from Flurry Insights, the blog for Yahoo’s mobile analytics service, covered the recent viewing trends.
Apps are now the top media channel in the United States: on average, people spend 198 minutes on mobile apps every day, while spending only 168 minutes watching TV.
The article noted that the 198 minutes spent on apps does not include time spent on a mobile browser: with that time added, users spend 220 minutes on mobile devices every day (a little more than 3.

A penny saved is a penny earned. But spending your pennies on mobile development is necessary to meet 21st century needs.
Regardless of how you plan to create that awesome anytime, anywhere mobile experience, it’s going to cost you. While the most obvious parts of the mobile price tag for native app development are initial development and launch, the long term maintenance of the app must also be considered.

Yahoo’s mobile analytics service, Flurry, released a new and provocative report about mobile apps versus mobile browser usage, in which they found audiences are spending almost an hour more with their mobile phones than last year. They also discussed the importance of how “content is king” in mobile apps.
The top mobile app categories included mobile messaging/social applications, entertainment, and games, which is nothing new; these continue to reign as the most popular among users as repeat research from different sources continues to prove this.

Benedict Evans, a leading mobile analyst with the Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, published a provocative post last week about the death of the mobile Internet.
He details the history of the mobile Web and posits that the mobile Internet is the Internet now. The desktop version of the Internet audience is smaller and declining, so organizations should focus resources on developing the mobile-optimized version first.

Google has announced a second wave of ‘Mobilegeddon’ search penalties for websites using mobile app install interstitials. Beginning November 1st, mobile app Web pages that use large app install interstitials to hide content from the users will be downgraded in search results for not being mobile-friendly.
These are the kind of pop-ups you get when you land on a website for the first time and it immediately prompts you to install their app before you see or experience any content A smarter strategy for this kind of prompt would be to set a tracking cookie and only prompt users that have come back multiple times to the website or base the prompt on a longer period of time or number of pageviews into a visit before you prompt users—not before they even get to see the website.

On DigitalGov, we frequently talk about some of the most popular app experiences, and research almost always shows that mobile messaging and social apps are the most frequently used.
Pew Research released a new report specifically about these wildly popular channels for mobile engagement, specifically focused on how youth use them, with some interesting results that government agencies should pay attention to for their digital strategies.
The report author, Maeve Duggan, said, “The results in this report reflect the noteworthy and rapid emergence of different kinds of communications tools serving different social needs.

This August, Aaron Gustafson, Web Standards Advocate at Microsoft, industry thought leader and speaker, and an author who wrote a leading book on adaptive web design, spoke to the government tech community at the U.S. General Services Administration and provided many magnificent insights into mobile strategy, design and tech development for reaching the widest audience possible across devices.
Gustafson’s insights are especially important and impactful for government agencies because he focuses on the full-gamut of technologies audiences use—not just the latest mobile phones, OSes and apps—so his work and perspective can help inform government agencies on how to grapple with the technology needs of very diverse constituencies.

Yahoo’s mobile analytics division, Flurry, released an interesting report, in July, comparing mobile usage among three distinct types of users around the world based on how frequently they launch mobile applications each day: Regular Users, Super Users and Mobile Addicts.
According to Flurry, of the 1.855 billion total mobile app users in the world:
985 million people or 53% are Regular Users 590 million people or 32% are Super Users 280 million people or 15% are Mobile Addicts Each of these categories grew at least 26%, or more, compared to 2014, with Mobile Addicts’ growth exploding to 59% in a year-over-year comparison.

Adobe released its quarterly Adobe Digital Index report this month, which showed websites that aren’t mobile optimized are seeing more than double-digit drops in traffic from Google’s organic search referrals.
This is after the leading search engine announced it would start penalizing websites, after April 21st, that weren’t optimized for mobile—also called “Mobilegeddon.” Microsoft’s Bing search engine also made a similar announcement, indicating that mobile-optimized sites would receive special benefits in its search results.

David Morell, a software engineer with Google, posted an interesting case study from the tech giant, sharing data about how users interacted with interstitials (ie webpages displayed before or after an expected content page) on their website. Their analysis showed that 69% of users completely abandoned the page and their original intent after being shown an interstitial.
Interstitials take many forms on the Web—native app installation prompts, advertisements, survey opt-in requests (popular on some government sites), email sign-up forms, etc.

Around this month’s Communities Theme, the DigitalGov team thought we’d round up your community rock stars. These are people in your communities who’ve gone above and beyond, who’ve contributed content, organized events, participated in developing toolkits and more. Let’s kick it off with the DigitalGov Summit Sounding Board.
DigitalGov Summit Sounding Board For the 2015 DigitalGov Summit we pulled together innovators from across the federal government to guide the programming, promote the CrowdHall (and Summit overall) and help identify speakers.

In July, comScore released a research paper, The Global Mobile Report: How Multi-Platform Audiences & Engagement Compare in the U.S., Canada, UK and Beyond, covering a lot of areas from smartphone penetration to Android vs. Apple preferences.
The most impactful trend for government agencies might be best communicated through this graphic:
In the U.S., tablets and smartphones are driving the majority of digital media usage for 18-to 54-year-olds. People 55 and older are on the cusp of breaking the 50% barrier for mobile and tablet usage.

England’s Government Digital Service (similar to our own U.S. Digital Services and 18F) did a study of how content on their websites is consumed on mobile and non-mobile devices and learned several key points for a future-focused and mobile-friendly government organization:
Mobile platforms account for the lion’s share of most of their content (see their graphic above), so being mobile-first and at least mobile-optimized is mandatory. More intense, complex tasks are still frequently started on desktops, but young and less affluent users expect to be able to do them on their smartphone.

Millennial Media released a new research report, Connected Consumers: Gaining Insights Across Screens, examining U.S. digital audiences from January 2014 until January 2015 with some interesting information that reinforces trends we’ve covered before. If your users fall into these demographics, you need to mobilize the content they’re accessing on mobile devices.
Mobile and Tablet Devices Account for Majority of Time If your audience is predominantly under 55 years old, you must be mobile-friendly because more than 60% of that audience’s digital consumption time is spent on mobile and tablet devices.

A Content Management System (CMS) allows people to easily publish, maintain and update information online. Choosing a CMS (or deciding whether you need one at all) is one that many agencies have faced. It’s not an easy choice because there are many solutions available to content managers.
As government agencies, the majority of content we deliver is for a large audience, the public. Therefore, your CMS should be a tool that will allow you to quickly and easily share information with the public.

Analytics company, Localytics, released a new report about mobile app retention rates from the past 4 years that agencies should heed when considering their needs for building native mobile apps, compared to mobile-friendly websites.
In the U.S. the number of users that re-engage more than once after installing is pretty low, with 19% of American users abandoning after just one use. The number of “regular” users who have opened the app more than 10 times is also low—42% in 2015, but that is trending upward from 41% in 2014 and 35% in 2013.

Federal agencies do not get a free pass on accessibility for mobile—as we stated earlier this month, Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act applies to ALL information and communication technology (ICT).
Luckily, there are a number of organizations working on guidelines and practices to help the private and public sectors create accessible mobile websites and applications. The M-Enabling Conference, an annual event dedicated to making mobile technology accessible, brought experts from around the world to talk about guidelines and practices for these efforts.

The more you test, the more you know.
We recently highlighted lessons learned from the CrowdSource Mobile Testing Program, discussed the mobile emulator dilemma that many agencies face, and today we’re back with a few insights on native app testing.
The Federal CrowdSource Mobile Testing Program yields a rich set of participant feedback that helps individual app creators improve their product. While the program primarily tests mobile websites created by federal agencies, the team tested early prototypes of the American Battle Monuments Commission’s Normandy App and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s CrowdMag app as a pilot.

Silicon Valley analyst Mary Meeker’s annual 2015 Internet Trends report has been released and is an exhaustive analysis of the world’s digital evolution (often mobile first driven) and how it is affecting business, culture and information. Previous years’ reports have tracked emerging tech from mobile to 3D printing, and this year is no different.
Here are some of the key highlights from the report for government agencies and mobile-focused people:

Mobile device penetration is growing, with larger screens providing more real-estate for content and users completing more complex tasks over longer periods of engagement. However, the new wave of digital screens on watches and wearables is requiring organizations to consider how to build smaller, faster and simpler interfaces to prepare for “glanceable moments.”
Ted Schadler from Forrester Research provided the following explanation: “here’s a rule of thumb: people will stare at a desktop screen for 3 minutes.

In April, comScore released new mobile data, and it pointed to the continuing growth of smartphones as the dominant mobile platform, especially in the United States, with almost a 77% smartphone penetration. Android and Apple continue to dominate the operating system market share with 52.8% and 41.7%, respectively.
The report said that “186.3 million people in the U.S. owned smartphones (76.6% mobile market penetration) during the three months ending in February, up 5% since November.

The drum beat of the continuing and quick cultural shift to mobile device dominance continues to grow—Google announced that more searches take place on mobile devices than desktops in 10 countries, including the U.S. and Japan.
These searches are often driven by ‘need-to-know’ information or utility-based actions (rather than entertainment or more passive consumption), which aligns with a lot of the information and resources government agencies provide on their digital properties.

Consumers are buying less tablets and more phablets, especially in the U.S.
Three recent research reports released in the past week from IDC, Flurry and Kantar each point to a shift in consumer purchasing habits over the past quarter, showing that consumers are reducing the number of tablet devices purchased with an increase in “phablet” or large 5-inch sized phones increasing.
“Phablets claimed 21% of all U.S. smartphone sales in Q1 2015 – nearly quadrupling their 6% share from the first quarter of 2014,” Katar WorldPanel’s report cites.

Just a week after the ‘Mobilegeddon’ shift in Google search engine rankings to favor mobile-friendly sites, comScore released a research report citing that the U.S. had reached a new inflection point—there are now more mobile-only Internet users than desktop-only.
What’s even more interesting is the drop desktop-only usage has taken over the past one-year period. comScore sites:
Just a year ago, there was still nearly twice the percentage of desktop-only internet users (19.

Mobile apps meet real world needs. App development is not a homogenous process, however.
Apple and Android devices are overwhelmingly dominant in device ownership and app development. So, we examined the Federal Mobile Apps Directory for iOS and Android offerings. We noticed a predominance of iOS applications: 170 apps were available on iOS, while only 93 were available on Android.
So, we wondered: what makes federal app development iOS-centric?

Mobile video is starting to hit its second wave for both consumption and creation, and government agencies can prepare now to ride this new channel for mobile and social engagement. Fueled by mobile bandwidth and cellular stability steadily increasing and consumers’ comfort with larger mobile devices fueling more video watching on mobile, a plethora of social apps now allow you to live stream and watch on mobile devices.

The Pew Research Center released a deep research dive into “U.S. Smartphone Use in 2015” that provided three big ideas and data points for government agencies to consider when planning their digital strategies.
More than 2/3 of Americans have smartphones; many of those are mobile first or mobile only Internet users. The report detailed that 6 in 10 Americans own a smartphone (64%), and 2 in 10 Americans now access the Internet primarily through their mobile phone (25%).

ComScore reported last week that smartphones now make up a whopping 75% of the mobile market. That’s up from 65% just one year ago. This means three-quarters of Americans over the age of 13 now have smartphones, and they are accessing government services with them more and more.
This is an undeniable fact because earlier this month the White House announced the Digital Analytics Dashboard. The announcement noted the importance of mobile-friendliness, stating that the Dashboard showed 33% of all traffic to federal sites over a 90-day period came from people using phones and tablets.

According to an article from Readwrite, the amount of money going to big data projects is steadily increasing despite widespread failure to achieve many results. For big data-related projects in global organizations, a total of $31 billion was spent in 2013 and that amount is expected to top $114 billion by 2018. The recognition that big data is important is present, but the results from big data projects have not illustrated this to the full extent.

Mobile World Congress, the world’s largest mobile infrastructure, software, hardware, product and app show, took place in Barcelona, Spain, and I attended for the fifth time. This year’s show shattered previous records with more than 93,000 attendees across all the areas that mobile touches. Here are a few notable trends and topics that I came away with and what government agencies should learn from them:
Phone Sizes One notable trend (or slowing of an explosive trend) was the size of mobile devices seems to have stabilized—for now.

As the use of smartphones continues to grow, it has become even more important for websites to be mobile-friendly. Google has been aware of this trend for quite some time. In response to this trend, Google made it a lot simpler for users to see mobile-friendly websites within search results by the use of a mobile-friendly tag back in November.
In order to assist the anytime, anywhere user, Google will begin ranking mobile-friendly sites higher in search results in April.

Practice makes perfect. But in the mobile world, it’s testing that makes products better.
For federal agencies that have developed their own apps or mobile-friendly sites, the CrowdSource Mobile Testing Program offers a simple way to collect feedback on compatibility testing.
Since the program’s inception in March 2013, eight federal mobile websites (including responsive design) have been tested by 65 federal employees from 41 agencies. The benefits are twofold: agencies receive actionable feedback about their mobile websites, and testers gain valuable knowledge about mobile websites that they can share with their own agencies.

Mobile user habits are a moving target, and designers have to adjust accordingly. Creative Bloq offers their Top 5 Trends in App Design for 2015 gathered from trends in changing hardware, increasing popularity of apps and the increasingly personal nature of mobile devices.
Bigger Screen Sizes. As we noted in last week’s Trends on Tuesday post, the smartphone sales increase in 2014 was partially due to the growing numbers of “phablet-sized” smartphones.

Smartphone adoption rate continues to rise, but the screen sizes users adopt continue to evolve.
According to preliminary data from the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker, smartphone vendors shipped a total of 375.2 million units during the fourth quarter of 2014. IDC states that this was an increase of more than 25%, compared to the fourth quarter in 2013. For the full year, IDC says the worldwide smartphone market saw a total of 1.

Don’t forget, mobile first strategy can include text messaging and SMS, not just native apps and responsive Web design. Ninety percent of all SMS messages are read within three minutes of being received, according to a recent blog post on Gigaom. Paired with an average open rate of 98% (versus 22% for email) and the fact that any mobile device out there is able to read a text message, SMS is a great way to reach out to pretty much anyone.

Innovative wearables, stronger wifi and more 3D printing have been among the many projections for the future of mobile in 2015. Whatever comes to pass, we can be certain that the anytime, anywhere user will develop new habits and desires based on new trends.
Government must accelerate its customer service approach with anytime, anywhere efforts to keep up. Here’s what I see agencies will have to do to keep up and–just maybe get ahead–in 2015.

Marketers are increasingly using SMS, push notifications, mobile apps, location-based functionality and other mobile-first techniques to reach constituents. That’s according to a recent article from Marketingland.com, which provided an overview of the mobile trends presented in Salesforce’s 2015 State of Marketing Report. The report was based on a survey of 5,000 marketers in 10 countries.
Some notable survey results were:
More than one-quarter of marketers have a mobile app (27%).

As we move into 2015, the amount of data available in the digital ecosystem will increase very rapidly because of the Internet of Things (IoT), social media and wearable tech. In the future, the problem lies not only with data collection, but with what one does with the data.
Big Data, one of the main and recurring buzzwords of the digital century, will remain important, but will force us to answer the question of what we will do with the data.

Approximately 18% of websites have implemented Responsive Web Design, according to the audit of websites Guy Podjarny completed in November. That’s more than 7% growth since his previous audit in January 2014.
That number may seem low with the popularity of Responsive Web Design and the preference of mobile websites from users, but implementing responsive Web design is not as easy at it seems.
In a report last year, Forrester found that “few organizations have the budget or risk appetite to ‘responsify’ all of their Web assets in one fell swoop.

Phablets, the popular term for smartphones with screen sizes from 5.5 to less than 7 inches, increased in popularity this holiday season. According to Flurry, 13% of new device activations in December were phablets, jumping from 4% in 2013.
Back in October, the International Data Corporation (IDC) predicted that “phablets” would outship tablets in 2015. Flurry backs up the IDC report finding that the holiday growth in phablet adoption came at the expense of both full-size and small tablets, whose activation percentages dropped to 11%.

QR codes, apps about whales, bullying and railroad crossings, challenges of responsive Web design and mobilizing charts and tables were the things you were most interested in this year.
We publish mobile trends every Tuesday and feature a government mobile app every Thursday on the mobile channel of DigitalGov. In addition, we do recaps of MobileGov Community of Practice events and other community articles in between. This year we published 281 articles.

Federal agencies are required by law see the list of applicable ones here to use privacy policies on their digital properties that explain how they use the data they collect about users and visitors. This ensures that these users and visitors know what the government is doing with their data.
The problem, according to Pew Research, is that half of these users don’t know what a privacy policy is.

Smartphones are changing how organizations do business—they are more than just smart Web browsers. As I noted last week, purchases from mobile phones have dramatically increased during the holiday shopping season. The infographic from IfByPhone demonstrates how people are using their smartphones not only to buy things and research products, but also to open emails and access social media. Users also still call organizations on the go.
87% of smartphone and tablet owners use their devices to shop.

Were you surfing the pre-Black Friday online sales while waiting for the Thanksgiving turkey to appear on the table? Turns out, you weren’t alone.
“Online sales for Thanksgiving 2014 grew 12.2%, with mobile sales accounting for 74% of that traffic,” according to Mobile Marketing Watch. To put that in context, mobile sales grew 26.1% percent over 2013. Whether it’s Thanksgiving, Black Friday or Cyber Monday, mobile is playing an ever increasing role in holiday shopping.

It has finally happened: Mobile has bumped TV as America’s first screen. Recent analysis from Flurry Analytics, which included data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, found that time spent on mobile devices grew in the U.S. by 9.3% to 2 hrs and 57 minutes, while time spent watching TV has remained flat at 2 hrs and 48 minutes daily.
So what are some of the factors that helped mobile snatch the big prize from television?

What’s the weather like? When does the next movie start? What time does Target close?
These are just a few questions that I may ask my phone on any given day. According to a recent Mobile Voice Study led by Google, I’m not the only having conversations with my phone. 55% of teens aged 13-18 use voice search every day, while 56% of adults said using voice search makes them feel tech-savvy.

In the mobile world, every second matters.
Mobile users are a finicky bunch. They want their information anytime, anywhere and quickly. As members of the MobileGov Community of Practice have noted last year, mobile user experience is about emotion. If that emotion is not happy, you will lose the user. For this month’s DigitalGov user experience theme, we decided to talk about how speed can be a key to a user’s happiness.

Is it a phone or is it a tablet? The International Data Corporation (IDC) predicts that “phablets,” the popular term for smartphones with screen sizes from 5.5 to less than 7 inches, will outship portable PCs this year and tablets in 2015. Specifically, total phablet volume will top 318 million units, surpassing the 233 million tablets forecast to ship in 2015. Further, IDC expects phablets to grow from 14.0% of the worldwide smartphone market in 2014 to 32.

It’s time for a mobile pop quiz. How well do you know consumers and the time they spend on mobile apps? ComScore recently released the U.S. Mobile App Report which sheds light on how Americans use mobile apps. Test your knowledge with the five questions and answers below:
Who is spending the most time in mobile apps? Millennials (18 to 34 year olds) spend more than 73 hours a month on mobile apps.

Recently, I was designing new outreach materials and needed a way to connect this offline collateral with my agency’s digital content. Using a QR (or Quick Response) code immediately came to mind, followed by the question, “Are QR codes still relevant?”
Opinions differ on their utility and I couldn’t find any objective data on how often they were scanned by users. Even their inventor has doubts about their shelf life.

U.S. Hispanics are ahead of the digital curve, according to an analysis of strategies of leading brands and forward-thinking marketers by Lisa Gevelber, Vice President of Americas Marketing. As we’ve noted before, Hispanics not only lead in adoption of new devices, they are also power users of mobile.
The report highlights a few categories supporting Gevelber’s observations:
The average Hispanic spends more than eight hours watching online video each month, over 90 minutes longer than the U.

Remember the Golden Age of Web development? A time long ago when there were only five desktop browsers to support, a few different screen sizes and every user connected via broadband? Well, those days are over. With the advent of mobile Web implementations like responsive Web design, there are three times the number of browsers working on many different-sized devices with varying operating systems and connection speeds. Trying to tackle all of these factors quickly becomes a testing nightmare.

Roughly 1 in 9 (11%) websites have adopted responsive Web design, according to research conducted by Guy Podjarny in January. While the number has risen in the last 7 months, I know you’re probably a little underwhelmed by that number. But if you are one of the agencies that have gone through the process of developing a responsive site, you are aware of the challenges that can often get in the way of progress.

We’ve seen (and experienced) a dramatic growth in mobile consumption in recent years. From app downloads to tablet ownership, the use of mobile devices continues to trend up. But, is this at the expense of desktop computer usage? Not really. The growth of mobile activity is incremental to what’s happening on existing platforms, according to comScore. Let’s take a closer look at mobile vs. PC usage over the past year:

First, it was party lines. Then, it was the rotary phone. Now, two-in-five (41%) U.S. households have officially said goodbye to landlines, according to a recent report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)’s National Center for Health Statistics.
If you have been keeping up with previous mobile trends, you won’t be surprised to learn who has decided to cut the telephone cord:
An estimated 39.

Do you ever find yourself conducting unofficial smartphone research? Ever since my agency decided to develop a mobile app, I know I do. Luckily, new data from ComScore on the U.S. smartphone subscriber market share can help eliminate the guesswork.
Here are a few of the key trends ComScore found in the U.S. smartphone industry for June 2014:
173 million people in the U.S. owned smartphones during the second quarter of 2014, up 4% since the previous quarter.

A recent Trends on Tuesday post cautioned against becoming another statistic in the treacherous, desolate wasteland known as the App Graveyard. Thankfully, there is some research that shows the likelihood of your app being banished to its grave is receding. Trends indicate that not only are app retention rates rising, user engagement is increasing. According to data collected by Flurry, the number of times apps are launched per day have increased significantly.

In a few short years, the number of mobile apps has exploded, and the time spent on apps continues to increase. However, one thing hasn’t changed: the number of apps individuals use. The average smartphone owner uses 22 to 28 apps in a month, according to new data from Nielsen. Here are a few highlights from the report:
U.S. smartphone users age 18 and over spend 30 hours, 15 minutes using apps each month, 65 % more time than they did just two years ago.

Apps that are downloaded, used a few times and then never used again, are considered part of the “app graveyard.” In fact, 95% of apps are discarded within a month of download by users, according to Smashing Magazine. By focusing on creating a great user experience, you can make sure your agency apps are used consistently and don’t end up in the app graveyard.
Smashing Magazine lists some “Lessons Learned From the App Graveyard” that government agencies should heed.

Approximately 70% of American households have a fixed Internet source of 0.2 megabits per second or greater, according to the U.S. Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) Measuring Broadband Across America Report that analyzes the digital divide in the U.S. Up 15% in the last decade, this increase in Internet subscription source has significant impact on how citizens are receiving, utilizing, and sharing vital information.
There were two interesting highlights for mobile implementers:

Major mobile milestones in May—try saying that three times! A new mobile usage report from ComScore revealed two significant shifts to mobile in May: total time spent on digital media and time spent on apps. Here are a few highlights from the report:
Mobile platforms—smartphones and tablets—accounted for 60% of total time spent on digital media, up from 50% a year ago. Mobile apps accounted for more than half (51%) of all time spent on digital media, up from 43% a year ago.

Like many Americans during the last month, I developed FIFA fever. Checking on scores, anticipating the latest Google Doodle and watching game highlights became part of my daily iPhone routine.
Despite the elimination of Team U.S.A, mobile video consumption continues to win new fans. Consider these mobile video viewing statistics:
On average, consumers spend 33 minutes a day watching video on mobile devices compared to 22 minutes a day watching video on desktops and laptops according to a report by eMarketer.

The rise of mobile device ownership is rapidly changing the way we, and our stakeholders, interact with organizations and information. From local weather to the status of our train, we look to our smartphones to not only provide the answers, but anticipate our questions. Forrester refers to this behavior as the mobile moment—a point in time and space when someone pulls out a mobile device to get what he or she wants immediately, in context.

Mobile devices are moving closer to the center of the social universe, according to this Sproutsocial article.
Platforms like Instagram, Pinterest and Twitter are overwhelmingly used on the go. Comscore predicts that there will be increasing monetization via social in the coming years. In the banking industry, where data shows many people have stopped going to brick and mortar banks, tying mobile and social together is critical. Organizations are increasingly adopting a SoLoMo approach in which they leverage the interplay between social, local and mobile.

Imagine a world where your mobile device delivers ads for goods and services within 100 yards of your location. According to Thinknear, a leader in targeted mobile advertising, that future may soon be a reality.
Here’s what Thinknear found when measuring the accuracy of location data used in mobile advertising:
67% of ad inventory comes with latitude and longitude information compared to 10% a few years ago 34% of mobile impressions are accurate within 100 meters; 9% are between 100 meters and 1000 meters; and 30% are between 1,000 meters and 10,000 meters 20% of mobile location-based ad inventory is outside 10,000 meters—more than six miles off target Mobile marketers aren’t the only ones who can benefit from accurate location data.

As highlighted in this Trends on Tuesday post, time spent on mobile phones—about 3 hours per day—has surpassed that of daily PC usage. This yields a significant opportunity for consumer interaction with federal agencies’ mobile apps, not just websites, and social media outlets.
To take advantage of new opportunities for consumer interaction, federal agencies are implementing social media as part of their mobile products. We surveyed the mobile products submitted to the Federal Apps Registry to see how agencies are incorporating social media into their mobile products.

With the recent growth of smartphone and tablet ownership, it’s no surprise that U.S. consumers are spending more time on mobile devices than PCs. Mobile usage will rise to nearly three hours per day in 2014, according to eMarketer. So how does mobile compare to other major media:
Mobile usage will rise to 2 hours 51 minutes in 2014, up from 2 hours and 19 minutes in 2013.

Since 2001, Mary Meeker has developed a knack for highlighting what’s currently happening on the Internet and how this information may impact technology and business in the future. Last week she released her 2014 Internet Trends and it reveals some interesting digital trends. Here are the highlights:
Marketing: Social messaging is changing from broadcasting a few messages to a large audience (like Facebook) to frequent interactions with targeted groups (like Snapchat).

If you’re a frequent Trends on Tuesday reader, you may recall our post titled, “Latinos Embrace the Mobile Future,” which outlined several key categories where Latinos have adopted mobile technology faster than other groups. A new report by Univision and the Interactive Advertising Bureau, took an in-depth look at the mobile habits of Hispanic millennials, revealing that these tech-savvy, young adults not only embrace the mobile future, but may shape what the mobile future will look like.

Smaller doesn’t mean more popular when it comes to smartphone screen size.
According to mobile analyst Canalys, shipments for phones with screens larger than 5″ represented a third of total shipments worldwide in Q1 this year. Devices with a screen size larger than 5″ are more popularly known as “phablets” (not quite tablets, not quite phones).
Government agencies have been implementing responsive design so their Web properties adjust to screen size.

“There’s an app for that.” New data from app analytics provider Flurry on mobile app usage reveals that smartphone users are taking this trademarked slogan to heart. Of the 2 hours and 42 minutes per day that a typical user is on a mobile device, mobile app usage accounts for 2 hours and 19 minutes of that time. In other words, app usage accounts for nearly 86 percent of time spent on a mobile device.

Here’s a statistic that might surprise you: 28% of Chief Information Officer (CIO)s in the private sector admitted in a survey they don’t have a plan for mobile technology. They cited compliance issues as a factor preventing their organizations from taking the necessary first step.
Now, you may be wondering, “Does my agency fit in that category?” Two years ago, the Digital Government Strategy required agencies to start planning and implementing anytime, anywhere strategies.

It’s no secret, if you want to reach Millennials, mobile is a great way to connect. This generation of tech-natives is adept at accessing large amounts of information held in the palms of their hands. However, their information overload also poses a challenge for agencies competing to gain their attention.
The Center for Media Research presents four suggestions for crafting a mobile strategy that will engage Millennials:
Have a mobile site.

While it does provide challenges, anytime, anywhere digital government provides numerous opportunities for contact centers to do business more effectively.
According to this study by Compare Business Products, one of the most important impacts for contact centers is that smartphone users can now connect with contact centers via voice calls, SMS messages, Internet pages, social media video chat and native apps. While mobile is changing user habits, the study states, “those contact centers that are able to embrace these channels and make it easy for customers to contact them through any of these at their whim will naturally be those that rise to the top of the pile and impress their customers.

What’s black and white and read all over? An e-reader. While it may be premature to revise classic riddles, a recent study by the Pew Research Center indicates that e-books are gaining popularity among American readers. Nearly three in ten adults (28%) reported reading an e-book in the past year, up from 23% at the end of 2012.
Who’s reading, and how:
Half of American adults now own either a tablet or an e-reader for reading e-content.

Have you ever opened an email on your smartphone, and then switched to your laptop to read the attachment or write your response? According to a new multi-device study, you’re not alone. More than 40 percent of all online adults move across devices—they start an activity on one device and finish it on another.
Reasons behind the switch…
Comfort and convenience: the main reasons why people change devices mid-activity are to use a larger screen and for easier typing Increases with the number of devices owned: 54% of people who own two devices and 73% of people who own three devices switch between them to complete tasks or activities Other key considerations: urgency of the task, length of time involved, security and privacy concerns and the level of detail required It’s important that we keep the online journey of our customers in mind when designing for the web.

159.8 million people in the U.S. over the age of 13 owned smartphones during the three months ending in January, up 7 percent since October, according to ComScore.
That is a 66.8 percent mobile market penetration, meaning two thirds of people in the country owned a smartphone at the beginning of this year. Comscore also finds Apple continues to sell the most devices, while Android is the top mobile platform.

Building quality mobile products is the greatest challenge for succeeding in the mobile space according to an infographic by SmartBear. One key to developing quality mobile products is testing, as “nearly 50% of consumers will delete an app if they encounter just a single bug.” As a result the following processes are used to ensure a quality mobile app: Manual Testing – 27.96% Automated Testing – 18.16% API Testing – 16.

Mobile devices are uploading data faster and mobile users are starting to expect better performance, according to Citrix. Fifty percent of web pages are taking 37.5% less time to load on a mobile device than they did just a year ago according the Citrix Mobile Analytics Report.
This infographic from the study shows the percentage of users who abandon a mobile website based on the speed with which it loads:

Tablet ownership continues to rise, 44% of Americans now owning one, according to Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) December 2013 estimates.
Other interesting findings include:
Exactly half of American adults now own either a tablet or an e-reader. 7 in 10 online consumers expect to buy a tablet sometime in the near future, according to the CEA research. What is also interesting to note is that a shift toward smaller tablet screens is occurring.

Global mobile data traffic almost doubled in 2013 according to Cisco’s recent Traffic Forecast Update. There are a number of other mobile data traffic trends in the report, but here are five trends we wanted to highlight today:
Global mobile data traffic grew 81 percent in 2013. Global mobile data traffic reached 1.5 exabytes per month at the end of 2013, up from 820 petabytes per month at the end of 2012.

Children’s mobile media use has doubled and in some cases tripled in the last two years, according an eSchool News report of a study by Common Sense Media. Here are the other key findings:
Roughly twice as many children use mobile media today than in 2011. “Traditional” screen media use, such as television and video games, has decreased by more than 30 minutes per day. Children still spend most of their media time watching television, but viewing habits have changed.

Piggybacking on one of my earlier posts, People are Crazy about Mobile, I’m going to talk about “Distracted Walking.” Who among us hasn’t walked and texted or checked Facebook or Twitter on our smartphones, but have bumped into someone or something while texting on your smartphone? I know I am guilty of that.
Maybe you’ve seen this viral video of a woman who, distracted by Facebook on her phone, fell into a fountain.

Smartphone adoption continues to grow exponentially. IDC recently reported smartphones accounted for 55.1% of worldwide mobile phone shipments last year.
Smartphone manufacturers shipped a whopping 1.004 billion smartphones last year, up 38.4% from 2012’s shipments of 725.3 million, according to data from IDC. Worldwide, phone makers shipped more than 1.8 billion cellphones, with smart devices accounting for 55.1% of the total. During the fourth quarter, 284.4 million smartphones shipped around the world, up 24.

Mobile first means more than just focusing on text content; it’s also includes considering visual content as important element of the user experience.
The infographic from Design for Infographics highlights what happens when a visual experience doesn’t meet mobile users expectations. Here are some tips on making sure your visual content, like infographics, create good visual user experiences.
1. Infographics should tell a story. Explain the key point’s people need to consider in your graphic.

While composing email on mobile phones is still a tricky feat, email reading is quickly shifting away from the desktop.
According to data from the US Consumer Device Preference Report: Q4 2013 from Movable Ink, way more than half of all email — a full 65 percent — is now being accessed via mobile devices in the U.S.
That’s up relatively steeply from just 61 percent for the third quarter of 2013.

According to the IBM Digital Analytics Benchmark report, overall 4th quarter online sales were up 10.3% year over year. Here were some of the key drivers:
• Mobile Traffic and Sales: Mobile traffic soared, accounting for nearly 35 percent of all online traffic, up 40 percent compared to the fourth quarter of 2012.
• Smartphones Browse, Tablets Buy: Smartphones drove 21.3 percent of all online traffic, making it the browsing device of choice.

This infographic from Light Reading addresses recent trends in mobile data use. We are struck by how much data was transferred via a WiFi connection vs. cellular. People are using WiFi connections way more than cellular ones.
Some other quick highlights:
In Q2 of 2013, 4x as much data was transferred over a WiFi connection vs. Cellular connection. Top 5 States with WiFi Bandwidth are VA, DE, NJ, MA, and NH.

A recent article in Mobile Marketing Watch suggested location-based sensor fusion would be featured on a billion mobile devices in 2016. Last year Mary Meeker said in 2013 that mobile would be wearable, sharable, drivable and flyable. We’ve gathered some other projections for the future functionality of mobile devices;
• Indoor Positioning (IPS) or Location-based Sensor Fusion – This is the projection from ABI. In a few years, you won’t need to locate a facility map to find out where you are.

Today we want to tell you about the federal agency trends we saw this year in the development of public facing mobile products.
Digital Government Strategy drove Mobile Gov Development Digital Government Strategy milestone 7.2 required agencies to implement two public facing mobile products in May. The White House highlighted these agency mobile product implementations.
Responsive Design Proliferated. During the summer and fall a number of agencies like the Department of State, Department of Commerce, Department of Energy, USA.

Here’s the latest news from the people are “crazy about mobile” beat. Do you remember the last time your phone was not within earshot? Well, according to this infographic from Fast Company, 25% of smartphone owners ages 18-44 surveyed said they couldn’t remember the last time their smartphone was not within ear shot.
There are a couple of significant facts from those who CAN remember;
Almost half of people surveyed, said it had been an hour or less since they last had their phone nearby.

Mobile shopping increased significantly this year for both Black Friday and Cyber Monday. But by how much? A lot says this report from IBM:
Online Sales Set New Record: Thanksgiving Day online sales grew by 19.7 percent year-over-year followed by Black Friday, with sales increasing 19 percent over 2012. Average order value for Black Friday was $135.27, up 2.2 percent year-over-year. Top Five Cities for Online Shopping: New York City took the top spot for online sales on Black Friday.

We’ve reported before that playing games is one of the most popular activities on mobile devices. A recent study by App Annie and IDC dives deeper into the traits and use habits of mobile gamers. For the most part, gamers tend to like tablet gaming experiences. Specifically,
Nearly half of iOS game players preferred the iPad, with the rest split fairly evenly between the iPhone and iPod Touch.

Canalys, an international IT company, predicted last week that tablets will almost out-ship all other PC form factors combined next year. They expect that tablets will account for almost 50% of the total client PC market (that includes desktops, notebooks, and tablets) in 2014.
PC shipments accounted for 40% of PC shipments in Q3 2013, less than half a million units behind global notebook shipments. Tablet domination is set to continue, with Canalys forecasting 285 million units to ship in 2014, growing to 396 million units in 2017.

Cyber Monday, billed as one of the busiest online-commerce days of the year, is spilling into the rest of the holiday season as more consumers use mobile devices to shop whenever they please.
Shoppers are no longer waiting to return to work on the Monday after Thanksgiving to surf and complete web deals. Consumers armed with tablets and smartphones are stretching the Cyber-Monday sales over a longer period according to Bloomberg.

Recently, Mobile Marketing Watch published Sprint’s interesting infographic showing how executives use their mobile devices.
“Would you trade your latte or morning cup of coffee for your mobile phone?” Sprint asked business professional executives. According to the results of their survey, turns out business professionals would rather have their smartphones than their coffee. Mobile devices are becoming more essential in how people get work done and stay connected. With high speed mobile networks available, it is now more possible to download large files and connect to the web, all while mobile.

More users are now accessing social media via mobile than on desktops. People are checking email or using social networks during their commute, in line at the grocery store, or waiting at the doctor’s office.
MarketingResearch.org recently covered the topic and UnifiedSocial created the infographic in the post (click it to get full version) around trends in social and mobile.
Here are some key stats:
Mobile users are nearly twice as likely to share content on social networks as desktop users Global shipments of tablets will eclipse PCs in 2015 78% of US Facebook users access via mobile at least once a month 60% of Twitter users access via mobile at least once a month Mobile users are 66% more likely to retweet content than web users.

The Pew Research Center recently released a report on “12 Trends Shaping Digital News.” Some of these trends show that mobile devices continue to affect how the public consumes the news. The report found:
19% of Americans saw news on a social network “yesterday” in 2012, more than double the 9% who had done so in 2010. 64% of tablet owners and 62% of smartphone owners said they got news on their devices in 2012.

Mobile Future recently released this infographic about the proliferation of connected devices. Among the key data points:
Today, there are 10 billion connected devices. By 2020, data from connected devices will more than double all global Internet traffic in 2012. Traffic from connected devices will grow 24 times in just five years. Global connected device revenue is $200 billion now and could grow to $1.2 trillion in 2020. In the future, virtually everything we make will be able to connect to the Internet.

Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project recently released their report on Cell Phone Activities for 2013. The report stated that 91% of American adults own a cell phone and many use their devices for more than just phone calls.
In Pew’s recent survey, they found the most popular activities people perform on the smartphones are what you might expect; texting, accessing the web, and emailing. App downloads by phone owners have increased to 50% – up from 22% in 2009.

Mobile searching has become a fact of life. According to a recent study by Econsultancy, 67% of smartphone owners had used their device to search for information in the past 7 days. The infographic below describes what they are searching for–the majority of searches are for arts, events and news.
Last year Google predicted that mobile search will overtake the desktop search over the next few years as tablet and smartphone growth continue to surge, doubling every 2 years.

From the time they can grasp an object in their hands, children are reaching for electronic gadgets of all kinds—particularly our smartphones and tablets.
The early adoption of mobile is growing each year as evidenced by this infographic from EveryDayFamily.com.
30 percent of 2- to 5-year-olds in the U.S. already know how to operate a smartphone or tablet computer 61 percent can play a basic computer game.

A recent survey of 100 retailers by EPiServer found that 46 percent of those with a mobile strategy in place and 74 percent of those planning to launch one soon said they are using mobile primarily to increase customer loyalty or provide a more personalized experience for customers. In comparison, only 8 percent said they use their mobile strategy for sales.
It’s speculated that the brand strategy was used when organizations felt they could not beat other companies with lower prices on products.

MobileMarketingWatch released an article explaining why it is important for the workplace to be making the move to mobile. When it comes to marketing, it is essential to understand your customer and be easily discoverable or else your product will go unseen. It is all about “place, place, place.” It is no secret the use of smartphones and tablets is increasing all the time, so being easily discoverable on these devices is absolutely essential.

Latinos appear to be adapting to mobile technology faster than other groups, according to Mobile Future. They are ahead of the average U.S. population in several key categories, such as:
47% of Latino adults have embraced wireless exclusively versus 34% of all U.S. adults 60% of Latinos own a smartphone versus 53% of white non-Latinos 69% of Latinos do their banking on smartphones Almost half of Latino middle school students use smartphones to help with their homework compared to 36% of non-Latino white students 76% of Latinos access the internet using exclusively mobile devices By 2017, Latinos are predicted to contribute to 20% of the tablet and smartphone market.

The way people are using mobile is changing—we are socializing in new ways; performing tasks in new ways, often multi-tasking between activities; and sharing and gathering information in new ways.
With the prolific numbers of mobile users and the increased use of mobile in our lives, comes a concern. A concern expressed repeatedly centers around the notion of habit. While many appreciate the continuous access to social networks and blogs, it has been observed that gains achieved in productivity do not automatically generate free time but instead tend to complicate the work–life balance.

According to research done by Strategy Analytics, global smartphone shipments grew 47 percent from 156.5 million units in the second quarter of 2012 to 229.6 million units in the second quarter of 2013. Additionally, the research finds that this growth is being driven by demand for Android phones in countries such as the US, China, India, and Brazil. Strikingly, Android now makes up for 80% of the global smartphone market.

Sparksheet recently posted an article by Greg Hickman, where he explains how to create mobile personas for your consumers when developing a mobile strategy.
When it comes to mobile marketing and strategy, he says it’s easy to get caught up in the hot new trends that might not necessarily be the best for promoting your product. The mobile product your agency is trying to promote needs to fit your customers, and creating mobile personas is a strategic way of doing that.

MobileMarketingWatch recently published an article on how the SMS marketing world is changing. Due to its popularity, SMS has evolved into one of the most effective mobile marketing strategies.
Improves Relevance for All: Marketers tailor campaigns to a variety of interests in order to create more relevant messages that are more effective and allows businesses of all sizes to take advantage of this resource. Spreading Across Industries: SMS marketing is a resource used by all different types of businesses since text messages have a 90% average open rate and are more effective than email notifications.

A study conducted by Nielson for Q1 2013 reports that almost half of all mobile users use their mobile devices as second screens while watching TV on a daily basis (46% for smartphones, 43% for tablets). Over two thirds of respondents said they use their devices while watching TV multiple times a week.
The study then asked these users what they were using their devices for. A majority of people responded that they use their devices for looking up general information, surfing the web, or using social media.

Jackie Rov of tmgmedia points out that with more than a billion smartphones in consumer’s pockets, it’s more important than ever for brands to adapt their strategy to mobile trends. To engage with consumers in the mobile era, we must understand the shift in consumer behavior – that immediacy and convenience fuel consumer actions.
To help us, Rov has selected 10 mobile trends from Forrester’s 2013 Mobile Trends for Marketers report which all brands should embrace: